Google has rebranded the whole of its Google Research division to Google AI as the company aggressively pursues developments in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence.

The change, announced ahead of its Google I/O developers conference this week, shows just how serious Google is when it comes to AI, which encompasses technologies such as computer vision, deep learning, and speech recognition.

Announcing the news in a blog post, Google said it has been implementing machine learning into nearly everything it does over the last few years.

"To better reflect this commitment, we're unifying our efforts under 'Google AI', which encompasses all the state-of-the-art research happening across Google," wrote Christian Howard, editor-in-chief of Google AI Communications.

Google has changed the homepage for Google AI so that it features published research on a variety of subject matters, stories of AI in action, and open source material and tools that others can use. The old Google Research site redirects to the new Google AI site.

Google has also renamed the Google Research Twitter and Google+ channels to Google AI as part of the change.

The rebrand has confused some computer scientists, with Volodymyr Kuleshov, a researcher in machine learning, AI, and genomics at Stanford, saying it seems wrong to call of Google's computer science research AI.